When I was a child in the fall of 1968, my frazzled mother would take a night off from the kitchen and drive her four rowdy sons to Padgett’s Cafe in downtown Marianna. Padgett’s served up the juiciest fried oysters in the state and had the world’s greatest jukebox tucked in a corner.

My older brothers loved to play the The Rolling Stones’ bawdy “Honky Tonk Women” because the cowbell sounded so crisp on the Rock-Ola’s speakers. Another fave was the instrumental “Classical Gas” by Mason Williams because my oldest brother was a guitarist. I usually picked “Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron” by The Royal Guardsmen because I was into silly novelty songs.

One night, my brother, Richard, selected the new tune “Wichita Lineman” by Glen Campbell and it stopped me mid-oyster. The lyrics painted a poetic picture of a lonely guy climbing and working on the telephone poles out on the Kansas prairie. The opening goes: “I am a lineman for the county/ And I drive the main road/ Searching in the sun for another overload/ I hear you singing in the wires/ I can hear you through the whine/ And the Wichita lineman is still on the line.”

The strings and keyboard punctuated the “still on the line” lyric with a repetitious riff that sounded like faint Morse code from another dimension. Campbell’s voice was so grounded and direct, yet the story was so sparse, sad and ethereal.

The lyrics went on: “I know I need a small vacation/ But it don’t look like rain, and if it snows/ That stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain/ And I need you more than want you/ And I want you for all time/ And the Wichita lineman is still on the line.”

Years later, Billy Joel described “Wichita Lineman,” which was written by Jimmy Webb, as “a simple song about an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts.” It sure packed an existential punch that night at Padgett’s Cafe.

My brother, Robert, thought it was about a football player whose position was defensive lineman.

Must-see TV

When “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour” hit television the next year, it was required viewing at our house. It was one of the few shows everyone in my fussy family could agree on. Campbell looked so wholesome and clean cut in an era when hippies “were destroying America,” according to my father. My mother decided I needed a neat, tidily parted hairstyle like Campbell’s well-behaved coif. Who cared if my hair was more like Bob Dylan’s unruly tumbleweed. I don’t how many bottles of Vitalis my mother wasted shellacking my hair before she finally gave up.

Despite the unfortunate hair experiment, I loved “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.” It was funny (a young Steve Martin was one of the staff writers) and the guests were a widely varied lot with everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Willie Nelson. The first time I saw the band Cream on TV was thanks to Campbell, who secretly wasn’t as square as his appearance.

Occasionally, the host sang other great Jimmy Webb songs such as “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” “Where’s the Playground Susie?” and “Galveston,” another example of Webb’s epic understatement. It was told from the point of view of a Vietnam War soldier in Southeast Asia as he longed for his girl back home in Texas. “Galveston” was poignant and personal rather than political and pointed, a rare feat in the same year as Woodstock.

“The song floored me then as it does today,” musician-producer Joe Henry wrote on his Facebook page after Campbell died of Alzheimer’s disease on Aug. 8. “It changed the way I heard everything that followed; priming me for the character studies of Randy Newman and Tom Waits that would soon raise the stakes for any of us in pursuit of such alchemy.”

Campbell’s death this month at 81 also marks the fading light of another era. He belonged to a class of Southern music stars who rose from abject poverty to become iconic entertainers. Other members of the class include James Brown, Johnny Cash, B.B. King and some guy named Elvis Presley. (Hang in there, Little Richard.) Campbell grew up during the Great Depression with his sharecropping family near Texarkana. His father recognized his musical talent early and put a cheap Sears guitar in the boy’s hands

At the dawn of the ‘60s, Campbell made his way to Los Angeles, where he found steady work as a session musician with a collective of studio pros known as The Wrecking Crew. His guitar playing can be heard on numerous classics — “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers, “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, “I’m A Believer” by The Monkees, “Strangers in the Night” by Frank Sinatra — as well as many others.

“People will come up and say, ‘Hey, do you remember when we played on such and such a record on such and such a date?’ I just say, ‘If you say so.’ I don’t remember all of them,” Campbell said over the phone when I interviewed him in 2005.

“I knew ‘Strangers in the Night’ was a hit when we recorded it,” Campbell told me. “We did it live in the studio with the whole orchestra. . . . From doing all those sessions, I learned what I wanted to have when I made my own records.”

One of his earliest and most overlooked solo songs is “Guess I’m Dumb,” co-written by The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. It’s a soaring, gorgeous pocket opera that flopped upon its release in 1965. Seek it out.

Campbell’s first Top 10 hit was in 1967 with “By The Time I Get To Phoenix.” He stumbled across the song while doing session work.

“I was in Studio 3 cutting a song with, I think, the Irish Rovers,” Campbell said during our phone chat. “I saw a record on the wall in the hall by Johnny Rivers. It had this song ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix.’ And that made me curious. I wondered if it was about the city or the bird. So I listened to it, and I cried because it made me homesick. And if you can cry to Johnny Rivers, you know that’s a good song. I recorded it the next day. And lo and behold it was one of the biggest records I ever had.”

Reluctant actor

While his recording career was marked by many brilliant moments and No. 1 hits (“Southern Nights” and “Rhinestone Cowboy”), Campbell’s acting career, um, lacked a certain spark. Campbell’s popular TV show led to a meeting with the legendary Western movie star John Wayne and a major role in the Oscar-winning “True Grit” in 1969.

“John Wayne’s 9-year-old daughter really loved my show, and she wanted to meet me,” Campbell said over the phone. “So Duke got in his station wagon and drove down to the studio one day. That’s how we met. . . . He’s the one who got me the part (in ‘True Grit’).”

As sort of a package deal, Campbell also landed the starring role in the misfired road picture “Norwood” (1970) along with hotshot New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath.

“There we were, a musician and a quarterback acting in a Hollywood movie. Neither one of us had acted before - and our records are still clean,” Campbell said and laughed. “I didn’t take to acting.”

Don’t worry, Glen, all is forgiven. We’ll just crank up “Wichita Lineman” and watch the movies it projects in our minds.